Email & Notification Issues

Email and notification issues account for roughly 12% of troubleshooting tickets. They range from internal team members receiving excessive notification emails to contacts getting messages after opting out, to emails silently failing to deliver. These are often the most frustrating issues because they are visible to the contact and affect their experience directly.

What it looks like

• A team member's inbox is flooded with internal notification emails (purchase alerts, task reminders) that keep arriving repeatedly.
• A contact who replied “STOP” is still receiving SMS messages.
• An email was sent by a workflow but the contact never received it (no bounce, no spam folder, just missing).
• A contact marked as DND (Do Not Disturb) received an automated message.
• SMS delivery shows as “failed” in the Conversations tab.
• The same notification email arrives multiple times for the same event.

Phantom internal notifications

Root cause

The Internal Notification workflows send email alerts to the studio team when purchases happen (intro offers, memberships, packages). These workflows trigger on field changes, and because Core syncs push ALL fields on every sync cycle, a field value that fluctuates across syncs can re-trigger the notification workflow.

Example: a contact purchases an intro offer. The purchase notification fires correctly on the first sync. But if a subsequent sync pushes the same Active Package value again (or a slightly different string formatting of the same package), the “Active Package changed” trigger fires again, and the team receives a second notification for the same purchase.

How to diagnose

1. Check the email content: are the notifications for the same contact and the same event, or for different contacts? If the same contact appears multiple times, the trigger is re-firing.
2. Check the contact's Audit Logs: look for multiple Integration sync entries that pushed the Active Package or Active Package Category field. If the value appears in multiple sync entries, each one triggered the workflow.
3. Check the notification workflow: some notification workflows have a “recently notified” check that prevents re-firing within a time window. If this check is missing, the workflow will fire on every qualifying trigger.

Resolution

The individual notifications cannot be recalled. For the underlying issue, check whether the notification workflow has a de-duplication condition (like checking for a “recently notified” tag or a time-based gate). If it does not, escalate to HQ to add one.

DND contacts still receiving messages

Root cause

When a contact replies “STOP” to an SMS, Grow marks them as DND (Do Not Disturb) for SMS. The DND/STOP Reply workflows also add specific tags like dnd and sms - opted out to the contact.

Most workflows in the STRONG system check for DND status before sending messages. But not all of them. If a workflow was created before the DND check pattern was standardized, or if it was copied from a template that did not include DND checks, it may send messages to opted-out contacts.

A second cause: the DND status in Grow is channel-specific. A contact can be DND for SMS but not for email. If a workflow sends both SMS and email, the SMS will be blocked but the email will still go through. This is correct behavior, but can be confusing if the studio expected all communication to stop.

How to diagnose

1. Check DND status: on the contact's profile, check the DND indicator. Note which channels are marked as DND (SMS, Email, or both).
2. Check tags: look for the dnd and sms - opted out tags. If these are present but messages were still sent, the sending workflow likely does not have a DND check.
3. Check the sending workflow: identify which workflow sent the message (visible in the contact's timeline). Open that workflow and look for a condition step before the send action that checks DND status or the dnd tag.

Resolution

SMS delivery failures

Root cause

SMS delivery can fail for several reasons, most of which are outside Grow's control:

• Invalid phone number: the number is formatted incorrectly, is a landline, or has been disconnected.
• Carrier filtering: the carrier blocked the message as suspected spam, usually because it contains a URL or the sending number has sent too many messages in a short period.
• Twilio number not configured: the location's Twilio sending number is not set up correctly or has expired.
• Country restrictions: some international numbers cannot receive SMS from Australian or US Twilio numbers.

How to diagnose

1. In Conversations: open the contact's conversation and look for the failed message. Hover over or click the message to see the delivery status and error details.
2. Check the phone number: verify the number includes the correct country code and is a mobile number (not a landline).
3. Check recent send volume: if the location sent a bulk SMS campaign recently, carrier filtering may have been triggered. Check if other contacts at the same location also had failures around the same time.

Resolution

For invalid numbers: update the phone number in the contact profile if you have the correct one. For carrier filtering: this usually resolves itself within 24 hours. If it persists across multiple contacts, the sending number may need to be registered or the message content adjusted. For Twilio configuration issues: escalate to HQ.

Emails going to spam

Root cause

Emails sent from Grow go through the Mailgun infrastructure. Email deliverability depends on several factors: the sending domain's reputation, DKIM/SPF/DMARC alignment, the email content, and the receiving email provider's spam filtering.

The most common cause of Grow emails hitting spam is the email content itself. Emails with excessive links, large images, or promotional language trigger spam filters, especially at providers like Gmail and Outlook that use machine learning for spam classification.

How to diagnose

1. Check delivery status: in the contact's conversation, check if the email shows as “Delivered” or “Bounced.” If it says Delivered but the contact cannot find it, ask them to check their spam/junk folder.
2. Check if it is one contact or many: if multiple contacts at different email providers report missing emails, the issue may be domain reputation. If it is only contacts at one provider (for example, all Gmail users), the issue is likely provider-specific filtering.

Resolution

For individual contacts: ask them to check spam/junk, mark the email as “not spam,” and add the sending address to their contacts. This trains their email provider to deliver future messages to the inbox.

For widespread delivery issues: escalate to HQ. Domain reputation and authentication configuration (DKIM, SPF, DMARC) are managed at the platform level, not per location.

Quick reference | Where to look